Parent and Child Volume III., Child Study and Training eBook

“But this educability of the higher mammals
and birds is, after all, quite limited. Conservatism
still continues in fashion. One generation is
much like another. It would be easy for foxes
to learn to climb trees, and many a fox might have
saved his life by so doing; yet quick-witted as he
is, this obvious device has never occurred to him.”

The vital problem with parents is how to fill this
period of plasticity, how to provide an educative
environment of the right kind.

Luther Burbank, in “The Training of the Human
Plant,” expresses complete confidence in the
power of the environment through appropriate training
to fashion the normal child, just as he could a plant,
into a most delightful and beautiful specimen of its
kind. He says: “Pick out any trait
you want in your child, granted that he is a normal
child, be it honesty, fairness, purity, lovableness,
industry, thrift, what not. By surrounding this
child with sunshine from the sky and your own heart,
by giving the closest communion with nature, by feeding
this child well-balanced, nutritious food, by giving
it all that is implied in healthful environmental
influences, and by doing all in love, you can thus
cultivate in the child and fix there for all its life
all of these traits, and on the other side, give him
foul air to breathe, keep him in a dusty factory or
an unwholesome school-room or a crowded tenement up
under the hot roof; keep him away from the sunshine,
take away from him music and laughter and happy faces;
cram his little brains with so-called knowledge; let
him have vicious associates in his hours out of school,
and at the age of ten you have fixed in him the opposite
traits. You have, perhaps, seen a prairie fire
sweep through the tall grass across a plain.
Nothing can stand before it, it must burn itself out.
That is what happens when you let weeds grow up in
your child’s life, and then set fire to them
by wrong environment.”

Mr. Burbank is probably over-enthusiastic in his belief
that natural education can do everything for the child;
but it is certain that environment does exercise a
powerful influence, during the plastic age, in determining
his character.

LESSON IV

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Compare the helplessness of the infant at
birth with the ability of the young of other animals.

2. At one year of age, what is the comparison?

3. What is the significance of prolonged infancy
respecting (a) possibility of adjustment to environment,
(b) possibility of training and education, (c) possibility
of profiting from experience, (d) the relation to heredity?

4. What advantage is it that man is born with
the germs of many capacities instead of with a few
activities that are perfectly developed?